Stephen Darori's Israel Book Review: Articles and Reviews: Beyond the Golden Bough with Seamus Heaney

Stephen Darori's Israel Book Review: Articles and Reviews: Beyond the Golden Bough with Seamus Heaney: Beyond the Golden Bough with Seamus Heaney The Irish poet’s posthumously published translation of Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ adds to our unders...

Beyond the Golden Bough with Seamus Heaney

The Irish poet’s posthumously published translation of Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ adds to our understanding of his oeuvre

©Antonio Olmos

Seamus Heaney photographed in 2008

Aeneid Book VI, by Seamus Heaney, Faber, RRP£14.99, 64 pages

This Lent, among the pre-Easter images of death and regeneration, an offering has appeared from a great poet who has now been dead nearly three years. On its cover is the golden bough, which you have to take with you to gain entry alive into the underworld. The volume is a gift from and for the dead — Seamus Heaney’s posthumously published translation of the central book in Virgil’s epic 12-book poem the Aeneid.

In Book Six, the hero Aeneas has just reached Italy, his promised land. Now he must pause. He must visit Hades, and once there he looks both backward and forward. He sees the shade of his father but also the future, the dynasty he will found at Rome. The book is the link between the new world and the old. It pivots the story from what has passed to what will come. It is a moment of recovery, drawing on but also haunted by everything Aeneas has lost and has managed to bring out safe from the fall of Troy.

When Virgil died in 19BC, he left the Aeneid slightly unfinished. Heaney died in Dublin in 2013 and his translation was also, perhaps, not entirely complete. He might have polished further. But it was in a publishable state. “Final”, he wrote on the last draft. His daughter Catherine has worked on it with his editor, the poet Matthew Hollis. “The decision to publish,” she said, “was one our family took after long and careful consideration. However, given its theme, of Aeneas’s search for his father in the afterlife, it would be hard to think of a more poignant way for us to mark the end of our father’s poetic journey.”

Heaney found inspiration in the dark: from below, in the land he belonged to, and his profound sense of community with ancestors both tribal and literary, from the past, and from his own responsive inwardness. In Station Island (1984), the darkness he set echoing was that of a tough inner pilgrimage on Lough Derg, Donegal. In this collection, shades of the dead ask him what he is doing writing poems while the Troubles tear society apart. But the last shade, James Joyce, is bracing as well as brutal and tells the poet to get on with it, get back in harness, write for the joy of it. “Fill the element/with signatures of your own frequency.” Again, inspiration comes from community, from a literary past but also a lived human past, which blows through the mind enlivening and freeing.It was absolutely the right decision and adds enormously to our understanding of Heaney’s rich oeuvre and the way he used his life in his work. He is a poet of densely woven memory, with a powerful sense of debt to tradition. “If you’re a poet,” he said in one of his wonderfully illuminating essays, “you are called upon to honour the dimensions of the art.” He honoured those dimensions in his essays; he also did it, from the start, in his poems. “Digging”, the first poem of his first collection Death of a Naturalist(1966), values the work of his father and grandfather, “going down and down/For the good turf. Digging”, and draws a parallel between their work on the land and his own work with language. The last poem in that collection, “Personal Helicon”, dedicated to his fellow poet Michael Longley, also addresses the poet’s calling but is concerned not with process but source, with inspiration. It describes the poet’s childhood passion for wells, in the farmland and bogland where he grew up. These wells map mythically on to the fountain on the Muses’ mountain, Helicon. “I rhyme”, ends the poem and the book, “To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”

In a 2008 interview, Heaney said the motifs of the Aeneid Book Six were always in his head: “The golden bough, Charon’s barge, the quest to meet the shade of the father.” A bit of mythic background to this book helps us understand his choices and aims. Many ancient cultures portrayed dying as a journey to the underworld but the dream of making that journey alive, and coming back, has been potent magic in literature from the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh onwards. The ancient Greeks called the motif katabasis, going down. It was such a feature of Greek myth that in 405BC Aristophanes, writing The Frogs after the tragic poet Euripides had died, showed Dionysus, god of tragedy, travelling to Hades to bring Euripides back.

Heaney’s instinct for mapping the mythic on to the personal was very sure, and Book Six, his daughter says, was always a ‘touchstone’ for him

The theme of katabasis was interwoven with images of cave-oracles, learning from the dark, and nekyia, a rite that summoned up the dead so you could learn from them about the future, the past, yourself. In The Odyssey, the hero does not go down but fills a trench with blood so the dead can drink from it and speak. He sees his dead mother, his dead companions, and the seer Teiresias who instructs him how to get home. Some Greek figures such as Heracles and Psyche go down to the underworld as part of a series of imposed trials. Others go to bring the dead back to life, as Orpheus hopes to do. All these resonances echo through the Christian Harrowing of Hell — Christ’s descent into the realm of the dead between the time of his crucifixion and his resurrection. Christ triumphs over Death, Christ becomes the hero who returns alive from the underworld. Virgil, writing 50 years or so before Christ’s crucifixion, used the same resonances of katabasis that Greek Christian writers used around the resurrection. Dante, fusing all these motifs in The Inferno, in the 14th century, took Virgil as his literary model and personal guide into and out of hell.

It is as crucial to understanding Heaney as to understanding Dante, that thekatabasis is not only a descent to the underworld but a descent into yourself, the inner journey every writer has to face. Rilke, in his Sonnets to Orpheus, says you can’t be a poet unless you “have been among the shades/and tuned your lyre there”. Inspiration, says Margaret Atwood, is “a hole that leads downwards”. “There is a ladder,” says Adrienne Rich in her poem “Diving into the Wreck”. “I go down . . . I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.”

Heaney’s instinct for mapping the mythic on to the personal was very sure, and Book Six, his daughter says, was always a “touchstone” for him. He went back to it again and again: this translation is the result of years of work, from the 1980s up to the month before he died. He began thinking of doing a whole translation when his first grandchild was born in 2007, but he had mined Book Six in poems long before, especially after 1986 when his own father died. At the beginning of his collectionSeeing Things (1991), he translated 50 lines from it in a poem called “The Golden Bough” which gave voice to filial grief. “I pray for one look, one face-to-face meeting with my dear father.” In District and Circle (2006), he glimpses his father in his own reflection in the London Underground. In 2010, inHuman Chain, he wrote a sequence called “Route 110,” sparked off by the birth of a granddaughter. Like Virgil in Book Six, he is thinking of descendants as well as ancestors. The new arrival is “one/Whose long wait on the shaded banks has ended/ . . . As her earthlight breaks.” The poem is built round a bus journey but is also a journey into his past, beginning with the poet buying a second-hand copy of Book Six as a teenager. The bookseller is the Sybil, and second-hand clothes on market stalls sway “like their owners’ shades close-packed on Charon’s barge”. The bus inspector, like Charon, “separated and directed everybody”. Passengers scatter as instructed, “like agitated rooks/ Around a rookery”.

In the new translation, this simile reappears as “flocks of birds/Blown inward from the stormy ocean”. Heaney’s translator’s note calls what he has done “neither a ‘version’ nor a crib, more like classics homework, the result of a life-long desire to honour the memory of my Latin teacher, Father Michael McGlinchey.” His teacher “created an inner literalist who still hunts for the main verb of a sentence and still, to the best of his ability, disentangles the subordinate clauses, although usually nowadays with the help of a crib from the Loeb Library”.

That “a” before the “nowhere” is very Heaney. He is faithful to the Latin; he is also being himself. He often alliterates (he was a master of alliteration); and with the alliteration can craftily vary the register, too. When Aeneas sees the gold bough glittering in the forest, Heaney flicks in among Anglo-Saxon words a grander, Latin-based adjective to underline the oddity: “green-leafed yet refulgent with gold/Like mistletoe shining in cold winter woods,/Gripping its tree but not grafted, always in leaf”.The Loeb Library publishes classic texts in parallel translation and occasionally here the Loeb version seems a little near the surface. When Aeneas finds the golden bough, Virgil says Aeneas “avidus refringit”. He breaks it off “avidus”: “eager”, “ardent”. The Loeb has “greedily breaks” and Heaney has followed suit: “greedily tore it off”. Would Virgil have wanted, for his reverent hero, the rather selfish note in English “greedy”? Might Heaney have moved on from the Loeb in a final revision? We will never know. Generally he is beautifully faithful to the Latin rather than the Loeb, and also to his own voice, his “own frequency”. In one famous line, Virgil shows Aeneas and the Sibyl walking towards the entrance to Hades. “Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram”: literally “They went dark [ie they themselves were dark] through shadow under lonely night.” Eight long syllables, then a shiver (a rustle of fear in the dark perhaps) of three short ones (nocte per), then two longs. The whole sound sums up the steady determination of facing “lonely” darkness, walking to the last place you want to go because it holds something you need. Heaney translates, “On they went then in darkness, through the lonely/ Shadowing night, a nowhere of deserted dwellings.”

In his earlier poem “The Golden Bough”, he translated Virgil into a long English line to represent the Latin’s 14-syllable hexameters. In this version, he recasts it in loose pentameters, generally 11-syllable lines of blank verse, which flow beautifully — especially at the heart of the book, the son’s meeting with his father’s ghost. Aeneas can see and talk to his father but not hug him. “Three times he tried to reach arms round that neck./Three times the form, reached for in vain, escaped/Like a breeze between his hands, a dream on wings.”

Three years after Heaney’s death these lines, and this whole book, remind us of what we lost to the underworld through his early death at 74. The absolute guarantee in that voice. The care for lineation and vowel, the blend of lyric craft with watchful intelligence and deep feeling; the integrity. If only Dionysus could go down and fetch him back.

Broken Vows: Tony Blair – The Tragedy of Power

 Broken Vows: Tony Blair – The Tragedy of Power is published by Faber (£20).

The prosecution may have persuasive arguments, but Tom Bower’s monotone biography feels like a show trial

History, so it is often said, is written by the victors. There seems to be an exception to that rule in the case of Tony Blair. Three consecutive election victories, two of them by landslides, ought to give him a place in the history books as Labour’s most successful leader. He is one of only two prime ministers since the Napoleonic wars to secure an unbroken decade at No 10. The economy grew in every single quarter of his premiership, a record unrivalled by any other major developed country. Sharply higher levels of investment went into health and education, the school and hospital building stock was renewed, child poverty went down and even the Tory party eventually embraced much of a legacy that includes the minimum wage, more spending on international aid, gender equality and gay rights.

When he left office, pollsters reported that a majority of voters thought he had done a good job as prime minister, all in all, and even that he was still “likable”. That’s not bad after a decade at the top. Yet it is now a commonplace of much public discourse that he was one of the most despicable characters ever to inhabit No 10, even the “most hated man in Britain”.

Some of this is his own fault. Even his best friends would acknowledge that he has not been a careful custodian of his post-prime ministerial reputation. At the same time, the right and some strands of the left have seen a self-interest in burying him with odium. Tories find revenge and justification for their current actions in trashing the reputation of the man who locked them out of power for the most extended stretch since the 18th century. Elements of the left, rather perversely, help the Conservatives when they talk as if Labour did nothing worth respecting with its longest span in office.

Here with the latest contribution to the Blair hate industry is Tom Bower, who has pounded out more than 600 pages of monotonal hostility. I came to this book with considerable admiration for the author. He is a dogged and ballsy investigative journalist who has taken on some highly tricky and litigious subjects like Robert Maxwell and Conrad Black. But I guess there may be a price to pay for making a living from hunting monsters. You end up only being able to see the dark side of anything. In the Bower version of Blair, there is nothing that he has touched that has not been shallow, worthless, dodgy or a deceit.

There are parts of the critique that are fair enough. Blair came to office with much of his agenda for the public services only sketchily thought out. An acrobat politician rather than an engineer politician, he was never sufficiently interested in the mechanics of government and that had consequences for its performance. He should not have tolerated a chancellor who sabotaged him from within, generating an internecine struggle for dominance that began on day one and did not cease until Gordon Brown finally supplanted him.

There is also a familiar ring to Bower’s charges about the Iraq war. In the wake of the terrorist atrocities in New York and Washington, the obsession with staying in lock step with George Bush blinded him to the many hazards of the American adventure. Blair was seduced by MI6, whose boss, Sir Richard Dearlove, over-promised on the agency’s ability to secure reliable intelligence about Saddam Hussein and then delivered material that was bogus or useless. He committed to joining the war long before he told the cabinet or the public, sold the invasion on the basis of a false prospectus about weapons of mass destruction, and the planning for the aftermath was shockingly and catastrophically inadequate.

He never introduces any of the challenges Blair faced when he arrived in office after 18 years of Conservative rule
The problem with the Bower version is that, even when his criticisms might be just, he tells the story in such a relentlessly accusatory tone that he leaves no room for any subtlety or context in his narrative. He never introduces the reader to any of the challenges that Blair faced when he arrived in office after 18 years of Conservative rule and with no previous ministerial experience. Nor does he acknowledge that any British prime minister would have faced an acute dilemma after 9/11 when confronted with an angry US and a president determined to go to war. If you are interested in why Blair made his mistakes, you won’t find any profounder explanation than the repeated assertion that he was a duplicitous and conceited fool. Any deeper inquiry into the personality of one of the more fascinating characters to live at No 10 is dismissed on the grounds that trying to “unravel” Blair is “unsatisfactory”.

Sometimes Bower is straining so hard to damn the accused that the author tumbles into the ridiculous. Several chapters are devoted to trying to sustain the accusation that Blair presided over a “silent conspiracy” to flood Britain with immigrants. Yup. It was so secret that immigration was on the front page of the newspapers most weeks. While Bower presents himself as a detached quester after the truth who approached this subject with unpartisan “curiosity”, he can’t always keep his prejudices under control. Writing about the legislation to control fox hunting, he claims that this represented “Blair’s betrayal of British values” and “middle England”. No, the curbs on the blood sport implemented a manifesto commitment for which middle England had voted.

This book is like attending a show trial at which the only witnesses you ever get to hear are those for the prosecution. If anyone he spoke to had a complimentary word to say about Blair, Bower does not report it. His voices are predominantly drawn from the ranks of disgruntled former civil servants and spleen-venting retired military officers. Their testimony might be more persuasive if any of them were ever prepared to concede to their misjudgments. We might also note that not one of the brass hats and mandarins who now fulminate about Iraq resigned at the time.

Even the most ardent Blair-haters will usually concede he devoted enormous amounts of time to the peace process

What about Northern Ireland? That surely is a bit of a challenge to Bower’s lust to find Blair guilty on all counts. Even the most ardent Blair-haters will usually concede that he devoted commendably enormous amounts of time and energy driving the peace process. On his watch, the IRA, which had been the most murderous killing machine in Europe, put itself out of business. Two communities that had been riven by decades of sectarian conflict agreed to lay aside violence and embrace democratic politics. It was a tribute to Blair’s perseverance, creativity, resilience and talent for persuasion that he induced Ian Paisley, the Dr No of unionism, and Martin McGuinness, the former IRA commander, to govern together. Bower gives a sparse few sentences to Northern Ireland in which he forces himself to acknowledge that Blair had a “success” – but only in order to launch an argument that it deluded the accused into thinking he had the capacity to resolve other conflicts.

It is now nearly a decade since he departed No 10. Time enough to lend a cooler perspective to one of the longest-serving occupants of that address? Time for a balanced and rounded assessment of Blair that includes the warts, but also has the all? If that is what you are looking for, you will not find it here.

•

Trencherman by Eben Venter– South Africa after nuclear meltdown

The white population has fled, government has all but vanished … First published in Afrikaans a decade ago, this post-apocalyptic successor to Heart of Darkness excavates the traumas of a nation

Trencherman, first published a decade ago in Afrikaans and now available for the first time in Britain, imagines a post-apocalyptic South Africa plunged into crisis by the explosion of the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station and the almost total emigration of the country’s white population. Overtly writing back to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Eben Venter depicts the once hopeful Rainbow Nation transformed into a feudal society run by criminal syndicates and blighted by child trafficking. Police are corrupt and central government has all but vanished.

The novel’s narrator, Martin Jasper Louw, known as Marlouw, is – like Venter – an Afrikaner expat in Australia. His sister, Heleen, pleads with him to return to the family’s former Eastern Cape farm, Ouplaas (Old Farm), where her adult son, Koert, now lives. After their parents’ death, Marlouw had convinced Heleen that she should sign the farm over to the families who worked the land as compensation for generations of inequality.

On his return to South Africa, Marlouw is warned that Koert, like Conrad’s Kurtz, has become a strongman, the distributor not of ivory but of dwindling supplies of mutton raised on the failing farm. Marlouw finds Ouplaas denuded of trees – fuel is a constant worry in the absence of electricity – and the house divided into sections allocated to the worker families, while Koert and his Aids-ravaged girlfriend, Esmie Phumzile, remain sequestered in their own private area.

It is the mystery of Koert’s power over these people that drives Venter’s story. Although valued by the farm’s new owners, who rely on him as enforcer and patron, Koert is also a parasite, destroying the lives of everyone around him. Initially prevented by Esmie and the others from seeing his nephew, Marlouw is distressed to find that old ways of relating quickly resurface: “My presence has opened up the past. I represent the bad old days … the oubaas strides across the werf with his kierie and hat. He thinks to himself: a boer doesn’t work with his hands.”

When Koert finally appears, late in the novel, it is impossible not to see the spectre of Marlon Brando’s Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, particularly in Marlouw’s shock at Koert’s physical transformation, the “beautiful” whiteness of his rower’s biceps lost to a hideous cascade of larval fat. Koert’s Afrikaans is as despoiled as his beauty: in place of the taal, or language, celebrated by apartheid-era Afrikanerdom, Koert speaks a melange of German, Dutch, archaic English, Afrikaans, isiXhosa and township slang in Luke Stubbs’s translation. A mad oracle foretelling the end of his people on the land, he warns Marlouw:

“Your lot’s language that you shaped … and propped up so. What for? For nothing. Snot brudder of mine, let Koert truth-say for you: I am he, I am the taal, the volk, I am your destiny, your fear, das Ende des Lebens … the very heart of darkness who has remained.”
In Marlouw’s humbling dependence on a community of black South Africans, we might hear an echo of Maureen Smales’s experience in Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, also a speculative fiction about a future South Africa thrown into civil war. And there is also something of JM Coetzee’s Cape dystopia, Life & Times of Michael K. Marlouw, like K, tries to find meaning amid the chaos by planting pumpkin seeds in earth that promises little generative hope.

Futurity is among the novel’s primary concerns. Marlouw and Koert, both childless, become horribly distorted mirrors of each other; where Marlouw has a club foot, Koert has a gangrenous one. In a bravura speech of megalomaniac delusion, Koert notes that the women of South Africa are worst affected by Aids and wonders what it will mean if no one is left to bear children.

Now, 10 years after its first publication, Trencherman can be read as one of the foundational texts of post-1994 South African speculative fiction, alongside Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland and Zoo City, and Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Nineveh and Green Lion. Venter’s novel, however, is working in a palpably different tradition, one in which those speculative energies are not global or even continental, but specific to South Africa, the dystopian nightmare framed as an effect of that country’s historical traumas and the real shortcomings of its democratic present.

If there is light in Marlouw’s journey into darkness, it is perhaps in his refusal to presume he could ever right all that has gone wrong. Venter resists easy answers, convinced, it seems, of the intractable complexities of South African society now, and the difficulty of overcoming the horrors of its past.

John Le Carre's 'An old-fashioned patriot'

It is hardly original to suggest that John le Carré, real name David Cornwell, could be a character from one of his own novels, but few can have realised just how much of his life and his self is directly present in the work. The author has admitted that his 1986 novel A Perfect Spy was in essence the story of his painful yet ambiguous relationship with his father, and confessed what a cathartic experience the writing of it was for him – “I cried and cried when it was over”. But as Adam Sisman’s perceptive, entertaining if over-long biography reveals, there is a large dash of le Carré, or rather of Cornwell, in every one of his books.

Of course, fiction is always to some extent autobiographical, since the novelist is his own prime source material. However, in le Carré’s case – and it certainly is a case – the life from the start might have been consciously shaped with an eye to the main plot.

Consider the evening in the 1960s when le Carré, basking in the fabulous success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, went to the cinema with his friend the novelist James Kennaway and Kennaway’s wife Susan. As it happened, le Carré and Susan were about to embark on a love affair that would bring le Carré much torment, since he cared for his friend almost as much he did for his friend’s wife. In the cinema, Sisman tells us, “Susan sat between James and David in the darkened cinema, each clasping her nearer hand”. And what was the film they were watching? Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, in which two men strive to preserve their friendship although they are in love with the same woman. As the saying goes, you couldn’t write it and be believed.

Cornwell was born in 1931 in Poole, Dorset. His father, Ronnie, a figure straight out of Dickens, was a charming con man who blighted David’s childhood, and would continue to pop up at unexpected and highly inconvenient moments in his adult life, cajoling him, cadging from him and, at one point, even attempting to blackmail him. “How I got out from under Ronnie, if I ever did,” le Carré wrote, “is the story of my life.”

His mother, the long-suffering Olive, behaved with equal heartlessness, running off one night with a business associate of Ronnie’s, leaving David and his older brother Tony asleep upstairs. Years passed before the boys finally realised that she would not be coming back. When they were sent to boarding school, the two kept a biscuit tin of coins hidden in a hollow tree, to pay for bus fares “so that one day,” Sisman writes, “like Peter Pan’s lost boys, they could go and find their mother”.

“David”, as Sisman refers to him throughout, attended Sherborne school, which he hated. By the late 1940s he was in Bern, in Switzerland, where he studied at the university for two years, perfecting his German – all his life he would retain his love of German literature, references to which are sprinkled throughout his books – and moulding a personality inside which he could conceal, and could conceal himself from, the wounds of his childhood. In Kirchenfeld one Christmas Day he met, as Sisman has it, “a county lady in tweeds and sensible shoes” who introduced herself as “Wendy Gillbanks”, and her friend “Sandy”; both worked at the British embassy, and they invited Cornwell to come round next day “for a glass of sherry and a spot of lunch”. Thus began his career as a spy.

He was no ideologue; if he was anything, he was the kind of old-fashioned patriot you might meet in the pages of John Buchan or the Somerset Maugham of the Ashenden stories. When the affable Sandy asked him to attend leftwing meetings and report back on any British citizens he might spot there, he was happy to do so. He was also asked “to pop down to Geneva for a day, and sit on a park bench with a volume of Goethe’s poems open on his lap, until a passing stranger asked whether he had seen his lost dog …” What larks.

He returned to England in 1952 and attended Lincoln College, Oxford, where he continued to spy on his student colleagues. Many years later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cornwell met the historian Timothy Garton Ash, who was writing a book about being spied on by the East German secret police. The two men had a long conversation about the morality of spying, which Cornwell said was “a question that’s haunted me these 45 years”. He admitted that in Garton Ash’s terms he had, indeed, betrayed colleagues and friends, but insisted that such actions were justified in protecting his country and defending a free society.

At this time, too, he underwent a long interview by Nigel Williams on BBC television, in the course of which he made a subtle and, surely, a key admission. Spying, he said, “felt like betrayal, but it had a voluptuous quality: this was a necessary sacrifice of morality and that is a very important component of what makes people spy, what attracts them”. One result of the interview was a furious letter from a friend of Le Carré’s from his Oxford days, Stanley Mitchell, a teacher and Russian translator who had remained a lifelong Marxist. “Mitchell felt,” Sisman writes, “that David was seeking his absolution for what he had done.”

Like the rest of us, only more so, Le Carré is a creature of contradictions. He was an active cold war warrior and undercover defender of the west, yet his hatred for America, the greatest or at least the largest western democracy, has turned him into a caricature of the Angry Old Man and, more seriously, has marred his later fiction.

It might be asserted that, in his Buchan/Maugham mode, his real fight was for Britain, yet from the outset he has declared himself an enemy of the British establishment who refused a CBE and will not darken the doors of the Garrick Club (Graham Greene, a keen le Carré admirer, pointed out that the word “establishment” appeared 17 times in a 15 page introduction le Carré wrote to a book on Kim Philby). As a young man, writing to his future wife Ann, he declared: “I shall always end up a revolutionary.” And when his father died he said of him, with rueful admiration, that he had “beaten the system”.

The same might be said of le Carré the writer. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is, as Greene declared, the best spy novel ever written; more than that, it showed how a “genre” novel could be a work of art – and also make a great deal of money. That none of his subsequent books achieved the same level of sublimity is only an indication of how marvellous that early work was. There are some, perhaps many, in the literary world who dismiss the notion of le Carré as a “serious” writer – but where are the serious writers, now that mainstream fiction has once again triumphed? Can one imagine a latterday Wings of the Dove or Ulysses being shortlisted for the Booker? Le Carré has produced at least one masterpiece, and a remarkable string of carefully crafted, well written, intelligent novels that engage directly with the contemporary world. He has said he finds it “very difficult to read my own stuff” – what writer of any worth does not? – “but I look at it with satisfaction.” And so he should.

Trencherman by Eben Venter ... South Africa after nuclear meltdown

The white population has fled, government has all but vanished … First published in Afrikaans a decade ago, this post-apocalyptic successor to Heart of Darkness excavates the traumas of a nation

Trencherman, first published a decade ago in Afrikaans and now available for the first time in Britain, imagines a post-apocalyptic South Africa plunged into crisis by the explosion of the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station and the almost total emigration of the country’s white population. Overtly writing back to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Eben Venter depicts the once hopeful Rainbow Nation transformed into a feudal society run by criminal syndicates and blighted by child trafficking. Police are corrupt and central government has all but vanished.

The novel’s narrator, Martin Jasper Louw, known as Marlouw, is – like Venter – an Afrikaner expat in Australia. His sister, Heleen, pleads with him to return to the family’s former Eastern Cape farm, Ouplaas (Old Farm), where her adult son, Koert, now lives. After their parents’ death, Marlouw had convinced Heleen that she should sign the farm over to the families who worked the land as compensation for generations of inequality.

On his return to South Africa, Marlouw is warned that Koert, like Conrad’s Kurtz, has become a strongman, the distributor not of ivory but of dwindling supplies of mutton raised on the failing farm. Marlouw finds Ouplaas denuded of trees – fuel is a constant worry in the absence of electricity – and the house divided into sections allocated to the worker families, while Koert and his Aids-ravaged girlfriend, Esmie Phumzile, remain sequestered in their own private area.


Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter
 Read more
It is the mystery of Koert’s power over these people that drives Venter’s story. Although valued by the farm’s new owners, who rely on him as enforcer and patron, Koert is also a parasite, destroying the lives of everyone around him. Initially prevented by Esmie and the others from seeing his nephew, Marlouw is distressed to find that old ways of relating quickly resurface: “My presence has opened up the past. I represent the bad old days … the oubaas strides across the werf with his kierie and hat. He thinks to himself: a boer doesn’t work with his hands.”

When Koert finally appears, late in the novel, it is impossible not to see the spectre of Marlon Brando’s Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, particularly in Marlouw’s shock at Koert’s physical transformation, the “beautiful” whiteness of his rower’s biceps lost to a hideous cascade of larval fat. Koert’s Afrikaans is as despoiled as his beauty: in place of the taal, or language, celebrated by apartheid-era Afrikanerdom, Koert speaks a melange of German, Dutch, archaic English, Afrikaans, isiXhosa and township slang in Luke Stubbs’s translation. A mad oracle foretelling the end of his people on the land, he warns Marlouw:

“Your lot’s language that you shaped … and propped up so. What for? For nothing. Snot brudder of mine, let Koert truth-say for you: I am he, I am the taal, the volk, I am your destiny, your fear, das Ende des Lebens … the very heart of darkness who has remained.”
In Marlouw’s humbling dependence on a community of black South Africans, we might hear an echo of Maureen Smales’s experience in Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, also a speculative fiction about a future South Africa thrown into civil war. And there is also something of JM Coetzee’s Cape dystopia, Life & Times of Michael K. Marlouw, like K, tries to find meaning amid the chaos by planting pumpkin seeds in earth that promises little generative hope.

Advertisement

Futurity is among the novel’s primary concerns. Marlouw and Koert, both childless, become horribly distorted mirrors of each other; where Marlouw has a club foot, Koert has a gangrenous one. In a bravura speech of megalomaniac delusion, Koert notes that the women of South Africa are worst affected by Aids and wonders what it will mean if no one is left to bear children.

Now, 10 years after its first publication, Trencherman can be read as one of the foundational texts of post-1994 South African speculative fiction, alongside Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland and Zoo City, and Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Nineveh and Green Lion. Venter’s novel, however, is working in a palpably different tradition, one in which those speculative energies are not global or even continental, but specific to South Africa, the dystopian nightmare framed as an effect of that country’s historical traumas and the real shortcomings of its democratic present.

If there is light in Marlouw’s journey into darkness, it is perhaps in his refusal to presume he could ever right all that has gone wrong. Venter resists easy answers, convinced, it seems, of the intractable complexities of South African society now, and the difficulty of overcoming the horrors of its past.

• Patrick Flanery’s I Am No One is published by Atlantic

Trump: The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump

Donald Trump has become arguably the world's best-known real-estate icon. He has undoubtedly worked hard for the honor. Trump routinely wakes up at 6AM, at which time he reads the morning papers before arriving to work by 9AM. He'll make anywhere from 50 to 100 phone calls daily, and will hold a dozen or so impromptu 15-minute meetings throughout the day. But Trump's work ethic is only part of the reason why he has come to define the quintessential real estate mogul.

Donald Trump provides for our benefit his eleven Trump Cards of success. They include thinking big, protecting the downside, maximizing options, knowing your market, using leverage, enhancing your location, getting the word out through a public relations/marketing campaign, fighting back, delivering the goods, controlling costs, and having fun. Yet even these Trump Cards fail to fully illuminate what it is that makes Trump so successful.

A great deal of Trump's success can be traced back to his father who built and sold homes throughout New York City, most prominently in Jamaica Estates. Donald would learn on the job from a young age about managing costs and putting together a working symphony of various real estate professionals. After transferring from Fordham University to the University of Pennsylvania to complete his undergraduate degree in business administration, Donald and his father bought Swifton Village in 1968, a 1200-unit FHA apartment complex in Cincinnati, Ohio. While the scope of a 1200-unit apartment complex may seem unfathomable to many, for Donald it was just the beginning. These formative years convinced Trump to look beyond NYC and take the next progressive step, which for him was to develop commercial real estate in Manhattan and later casinos in Atlantic City.

Trump approaches business very straightforwardly. He believes that the art of business can be reduced to the simple formula of buy low sell high. Trump writes, "Much as I like the [Beverly Hill's Hotel] I'm interested in it only if I can get it for a much better price than they're now asking" (12). Trump will walk away from a very good property if the numbers don't match up. Trump makes a point of surrounding himself with the best talent when making these hard decisions. In fact, he attributes much of his success to surrounding himself with the best talent available. Throughout the book Trump writes:

"I'm just looking to hire the best talent, wherever I can find it (6) [and] I have a very simple rule when it comes to management: hire the best people from your competitors, pay them more than they were earning and give them bonuses and incentives based on their performance. That's how you build a first-class operation" (220).

Simply, there exists no room for second best. In this respect, much can be learned from Trump and applied to our lives. However, there exists another more intangible component of Trump's success that underscores the need for of a heightened sense of intuition.

This sense of intuition can be interpreted by many as self-confidence, the experience of feeling comfortable in one's own skin, or going with one's gut. In any event, this feeling transcends many areas of Trump's life, including a pervading sense of justice:

"I hate lawsuits and depositions, but the fact is that if you're right, you've got to take a stand, or people will walk all over you (7) [and] You have to be very rough and very tough with most contractors or they'll take the shirt right of your back" (38).

A sense of intuition cannot be underscored enough. Trump believes in it so strongly that he writes, "You can take the smartest kid at Wharton, the one who gets straight A's and has a 170 IQ, and if he doesn't have the instincts, he'll never be a successful entrepreneur. Moreover, most people who do have the instincts will never recognize that they do, because they don't have the courage or the good fortune to discover their potential (46)." Trump's remarkable history of deal making should embolden us to apply some of the very same business principles that made Trump so successful to our lives in an effort to discover our own true potential.

Bashar al-Assad's Syrian Holocaust It IS About Islam: Exposing the Truth About ISIS, Al Qaeda, Iran, and the Caliphate (The Control Series)by Glenn Beck Paperback Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick,Hardcover, Doubleday, Threshold Editions Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect by Reese Erlich and Noam Chomsky Hardcover Prometheus Books The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution Paperback by Patrick Cockburn Verso Syria's Uprising and the Fracturing of the Levant (Adelphi series) 1st Edition by Emile Hokayem The Struggle for Power in Syria: Politics and Society under Asad and the Ba'th Party Revised Edition by Nikolaos van Dam I.B. Tauris The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency 1st Edition by Charles R. Lister , Oxford University Press

Bashar Hafez al-Assad's Syrian Holocaust or should the a finger be pointed ant Obama, Putin,Merkel , Cameron and Nato for not intervene and removing the Adolf Eichmann , The Adolf Hitler personified in Bashar Hafez al-Assad. Ignorance isn't bliss. Social Media tracks the Holocaust second by second and Obama prefers to be the Gigolo in Cuba with Castro Bros, the Social Lighty in the House of White and irrelevance as the 44th President of the many and mighty States south and west of Canada and Commander in Chief of the Greatest Army ever assembled. Obama will go down in History as the one who knew and chose to do nothing. A Blind Eye is An Act of Evil worse than the Evil of Assad itself. Every year for 2 minutes Israel comes to a hold in Memory of the 6 Million who were slaughtered by the Final Solution Holocaust . Netanyahu , Bennett , Lapid ,Lieberman, Herzog and anyone who can get a sound bite mike trust in front of them swears , "Never Ever Again"  and yet with Mossad Knowledge and Superb Intel and by far the most powerful , effective and moral Army ever assembled  in the Middle East.... choose to ignore and say, "Hey , not our problem". Because this Holocaust isn't Jewish ... is this just cause for the Zionist Colonialist of the Balfour Declaration to Ignore and hey I am a rip roaring Zionist and one of those Colonial Settlers.Are The Zionists equally to blame for the Genocide of Bashar Hafez al-Assad in Syria.  

The cold numbers are the first thing that hit you. Figures telling of a human catastrophe on a scale hard to compute. Suffering on a level to which any rational response seems inadequate – 470,000 people killed, according to the latest estimates; 11.5 percent of the population injured; 45 percent of a country of 22 million made homeless; 4 million refugees and 6.36 million internally displaced persons. Life expectancy is down from 70.5 years in 2010 to an estimated 55.4 years in 2015. Welcome to the Syrian civil war.



For those of us who have covered the war closely, these are not just numbers in black and white. They have behind them searing images and memories impossible to erase.

I remember the throngs of refugees in the olive groves close to the border fence north of Aleppo in the summer of 2012. The battle for the city was raging at its full murderous strength a few kilometers to the south. The refugees, mostly Sunni Arabs, were trying to find a place safe from the destructive intentions of Bashar Assad's air force. They had no way to get into Turkey. Their forlorn hope was to take their families as close as possible to the border fence. They believed that the Syrian Air Force would not dare to bomb so close to the powerful northern neighbor.

Whole families with small children ‒ some people terribly wounded by the bombings ‒ living in the olive groves with neither shelter nor provisions. But I had been in Aleppo city, too, and I knew that their calculation made sense. Inside the city, the barrel bombs were falling without discrimination. Houses, buildings, lives turned into nothing.

The Syrian civil war is the greatest catastrophe to hit the Levant since World War II.



This is what the figures are made of. For five years, this is what the lives of Syrians have looked like. It is the greatest catastrophe to have hit the Levant since World War II.

Few people saw the war coming. For a moment, it looked as though the wave of regional change would pass Syria by. The prison-house state constructed by the Ba'ath Party had strong walls, after all. Its residents seemed too cowed, too intimidated to challenge their dictator.

Assad himself, in a strange interview given to the Wall Street Journal, published January 31, 2011, explained why, in his view, Syria had not and would not experience instability. "We have more difficult circumstances than most of the Arab countries but in spite of that Syria is stable," the dictator said. "Why? Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence between your policy and the people's beliefs and interests, you will have this vacuum that creates disturbance."

Here was the language of the Arab nationalist police state in all its self-assurance and blindness. The prisons full of political prisoners. The citizenry cowed by an all-embracing structure of surveillance and repression. And on top of it all, the "president" blithely insisting to his compliant Western interviewer that the stability was the result of a kind of tacit contract of consent between the regime and the people.

It couldn't hold. And, of course, it didn't. As nemesis follows hubris, so in March 2011, demonstrations by schoolchildren in Dera'a province were brutally repressed by the local security forces. A boy called Hamza al-Khatib who was murdered in custody became the symbol for the protests. The unrest spread to other Sunni Arab parts of the country – Homs, Hama, Banias. Assad, whose rule, he had claimed, rested on the unspoken consent of his people, rapidly and predictably abandoned any such nonsense and sought simply to drown the spreading protests in the blood of the protesters.

By summer, the stage was set for the civil war to come. The death toll was rapidly mounting. Western leaders called for Assad's resignation in August. But Assad was going nowhere. These were the days of the Arab Spring. People power and demonstrations were supposed to be enough to bring down the dictators. This happy narrative neglected to note a fact of salient importance. Deposed dictators – Zine El Abidine Bin-Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Ali Abdullah Salah in Yemen – had fallen not only or mainly because of popular unrest against them. They were deposed because their patron, the United States of America, chose to abandon them in their hour of need. Assad had chosen different friends. He wasn't aligned with the West, but with Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran. And the response of these two powers, from the very outset, was to provide the dictator with whatever level of support he required to stay in his seat.

The form this took varied. Russia used its Security Council veto at the UN to prevent any concerted action against the regime. Moscow also kept the weapons coming. The Iranians used their expertise in crowd control to help Assad control the demonstrations. By the end of 2011, it was clear that the bright lie of the "Arab Spring," according to which beautiful young people marching in the streets was all it took to topple dictators, wasn't going to work in Syria.

At this point, the opposition made the fateful decision to try a different way. Already, groups of recently deserted soldiers were arming themselves to defend the demonstrations against the attentions of Assad's soldiers. In early 2012, these began to crystallize into the first rebel battalions, organizing not only to defend protests, but also to attack the army and make areas in revolt impassable for the government's forces. The stage was set for war.


Lieutenant Bilal Khabir of the Free Syrian Army, with comrades, Sarmin, Idlib Province, Syria, February 2012.
I visited rebel-controlled Syria for the first time during that period. Idlib Province – one of the heartlands of the emergent insurgency. I remember the fevered atmosphere of the time and the hopes of swift victory. I interviewed a recent defector from Assad's airborne troops in a village called Sarmin close to Idlib City. Lieutenant Bilal Khabir was typical of the type of fighters who were capturing the world's attention at that time. Young, idealistic and brave, Khabir had deserted his unit after a brother officer was executed for refusing to fire on civilian demonstrators in Dera'a.

"I am with the law, not against the law," Khabir had told me, as we sat in a half-built structure that formed the rebels' headquarters in Sarmin. "The regime is fascist and criminal. We expect what happened in Homs to happen here. But even with our simple weapons, we are ready to fight. Either Bashar stays, or we stay. And freedom is the promise of God on earth."

They fought. Khabir himself rose to senior command in the rebellion in Idlib, before being terribly wounded in action in 2013. The rebels of Idlib and Aleppo and Dera'a, Quneitra and Raqqa, Homs and Hama and Deir al-Zor and Damascus made much of those areas no-go zones for Assad's army in the year that followed.

But even then, in those first days, it was possible to discern the sectarian hand inside the velvet glove of the rebellion's fine words. In Sarmin and Binnish, in February of 2012, Salafi fighting groups separate from the ragtag recent army deserters were already operating openly, apart from the enthusiastic, often younger rebels of the non-Islamist units. As the bloodletting continued in 2012 and 2013, it was these organizations that began to make headway. The secular rebels had no real vision or idea to put in their place. They just wanted to destroy Assad. The ideas came from the Islamists. The money, meanwhile, was coming mainly from Qatar and Turkey. Both these countries favored the emergent Islamist groups, whose inclinations mirrored their own.

And, of course, there was a discernible sectarian logic to the rebellion from the start. The Assad family hailed from the country's 12 percent Alawi minority. By no means were all those who had benefited from Assad's rule Alawis. There were Sunni Arabs and others in senior positions. Similarly, it was possible to find non-Sunnis and non-Arabs among the rebels. But the core dynamic was one in which the dictator relied, ultimately, on the support of his sect. The Shabiha, Alawi thugs and criminals, who would later be organized by the Iranians into a well-drilled militia, were crucial to the regime's survival from the start. Alawi-dominated military units – the special forces, the Republican Guard, the 4th Armored Division – were also relied upon from the outset when the large formations of Sunni conscripts were of doubtful loyalty.

The rebellion, similarly, emerged from the 60 percent Sunni-Arab majority of the country. In the course of 2012 and 2013, the sectarian logic of the war became increasingly inescapable. It was marked by the emergence of new and powerful formations that would play a crucial role. In the summer of 2012, Assad carried out a strategic withdrawal from a large swathe of Syria's northern border with Turkey. The withdrawal was itself dictated by sectarian logic. Assad was short of manpower. Because of his regime's narrow base, it had become clear that he did not have sufficient men to hold the entirety of a country largely in revolt against him. This fateful decision, made out of urgent necessity, began the process of fragmentation that is now very advanced in Syria. In the course of 2012 and 2013, the country effectively separated into a number of enclaves that survive to this day.

The regime held on to Damascus and the western coastal areas, and the road links between them. The Sunni rebels and Islamists had the east and south. The local franchise of the Kurdish PKK (Kurdish Workers Party), known as the PYD (Democratic Union Party), established itself as the de facto ruler of three non-contiguous Kurdish enclaves stretching along the Syrian-Turkish border. Their formidable Kurdish YPG militia emerged as one of the most powerful of the military organizations, which now divided control of the territory of Syria between them. The emergence of the Kurdish enclaves was further testimony to the sectarian dynamic now underlying the war.

The rise of extreme Salafi Islamist groups from the womb of the rebellion confirmed the trend. On January 23, 2012, the foundation of the Jabhat an-Nusra li-Ahl ash-Shām (Support Front for the People of the Levant) was announced. Usually shortened to Jabhat al-Nusra, this was the official franchise of the al-Qaida network in Syria. Led by Sheikh Muhammad al-Julani it quickly gained a reputation for military effectiveness and particular ruthlessness. Then, in May 2013, in the course of a dispute between the Nusra leadership and the leadership of the Iraqi franchise of al-Qaida, a faction began operating in Syria under the name of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS, or ISIL). Little noticed at the time, this jihadi group was set to transform the Syrian conflict, and then the region.

I entered Syria for reporting purposes on numerous occasions during that period. Amid the chaos and suffering, it was possible to discern that something extraordinary was taking place. The state structures that had existed since the early 20th century in this area – "Syria" and later "Iraq" were effectively ceasing to exist.

The old borders did not deter the military groups. Journalists crossed "illegally" with rebel assistance. Sometimes the crossings were lengthy and perilous affairs. But, more often, the border was hardly noticed, fictionalized. What had appeared at the beginning to be a war of a populace against a brutal dictatorship turned out to be something else entirely. The walls of the prison-house states of Syria and Iraq had been breached. New and unfamiliar entities were making war among the ruins.

In the Turkish border town of Kielis, in the early summer of 2014, I interviewed two ISIS members. I had just crossed back from Syria, after visiting the besieged Kurdish Kobani enclave.

At a place called Haj Ismail, a few days previously, comrades of the two men I met in Kielis had been shooting at me while I was interviewing a YPG commander at a forward position. The ISIS positions were about 200 meters away, across a flat, blank landscape. The firing began and I ran after the fighters as they raced for a machine-gun position behind some sandbags to return fire. It was a routine incident along a tense section of frontline. But it was passingly strange to be sitting in a room chatting and drinking tea with the men on the other side of the lines, just two days later.

The two men called themselves Abu Muhammad and Abu Nur. They were both Syrians. "If ISIS falls, you can forget about Sunni people in Syria," Abu Muhammad told me, after relating the story of his own long journey to the jihadi organization. The men were animated by a strange combination of local sectarianism and vast, millennial hostility to the West. The two fitted seamlessly together and the power of their combination was evident in the rapid growth of ISIS and the bloodthirsty fanaticism of its fighters.

As for the movement's goal, Abu Nur spoke about it with reverence. 'We want the caliphate, something old and new, from the time of Muhammad. The Europeans came here and created false borders. We want to break these borders." ISIS, in other words, was emerging directly from the reality of the Levant in 2014.

The situation, indeed, was becoming increasingly clear. As my friend Mahmoud, a onetime teacher turned political analyst and a supporter of the rebels bluntly expressed it, "In Syria, today, there are three groups worth mentioning. ISIS, the regime and the Kurds. Nothing else."

The reality of fragmentation and sectarian war burst across the borders a few months after that interview with the astonishing advance of ISIS into Iraq. By August, the jihadis had reached the gates of Baghdad and Erbil. They were stopped only after the entry of US air power into the fray.

The advance of ISIS into Iraq brought the logic of the Syrian war into the larger neighboring country. In the dramatic and terrifying events around Sinjar Mountain that summer ‒ the harrowing attempt at the genocide of the Yazidi people ‒the sheer savagery of the Sunni jihadis was laid bare. Here was a horror that defied description. But, while the singling out of the Yazidis carried with it a special evil, the Assad regime remained responsible for, by far, the largest number of the deaths in Syria.

The situation today retains the essential contours that emerged in mid-2014. The Syrian war has metastasized across borders. As a result, neither Syria, nor Iraq, nor indeed Lebanon any longer constitute states in the usually understood sense of that word. Rather, the entire vast landscape between the Iraq-Iran border and the Mediterranean Sea is, today, divided up between various political-military organizations and arrangements, almost exclusively organized along religious sectarian or ethnic lines.

They vary in orientation from the radical secularism and socialist outlook of the Syrian Kurds in autonomous "Rojava" to the murderous and apocalyptic Sunni jihadism of the Islamic State.

Along the way, one may find the Iran-oriented Shi'ite Islamism of Hezbollah and the Shi'ite militias of Iraq, the pro-Western, tribal conservatism of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq, and various types of Sunni Islamism in the poorly governed wastelands of the Syrian-Sunni rebels.

The war has, of course, also impacted far beyond the Middle East itself. The US and the West have staunchly sought to keep their involvement to a minimum. But, today, Western air power and special forces are playing a key role in the effort to reduce and destroy the Islamic State.

Further west, the Russian intervention after September 2015 almost certainly saved the Assad regime from destruction and reversed the course of the war. Currently, there are peace negotiations in Geneva and a fitfully observed cease-fire.

But the cease-fire relates only to the original war in Syria (regime vs. rebels). It doesn't impact on the other conflicts that emerged from its womb (YPG/SDF against ISIS, rebels against Kurds, KRG and Iraq against ISIS, Turks against PKK, regime against ISIS.

The bombings in Brussels on March 22 are the latest demonstration of the far reach of the war. What began with demonstrations by schoolchildren in Dera'a has now turned into a process of flux and convulsion of historic proportion.

I think of the Syrian war, and my mind is filled once more with memories of astonishing vividness: The deep blue of the sky during a barrel bombing of the Sha'ar neighborhood in Aleppo, in the scorching summer of 2012. YPG fighters crossing the Tigris River in dinghies by night, in dead silence. The swishing of the water, the stars reflected in it and the blank expanse ahead. A hospital for Kurdish fighters in Derik, in summer 2014, filled with men wounded in the fight to open the corridor to Sinjar Mountain and the trapped Yazidis. Very dark-skinned Ktaeb Hezbollah militiamen at a frontline position just east of Ramadi city in Iraq in July 2015. The ghost-like figures of ISIS men, in black, running quickly past a gap in their defensive position. The first rebels, in Idlib Province, with hope, long since lost. The Yazidi refugees, just down from Sinjar, at the Newroz refugee camp in summer 2014, their exhausted, haunted eyes and the black horror of the things they described.

We are left with the bare facts behind all this – facts with which the policymaking echelon in the West has only just begun to grapple. The prison-house states are broken to pieces. The forces released from their ruins are swirling and clashing across the region and heading beyond it. Syria has become one of the hinges upon which regional and global events turn. The reputations of great powers, global and regional, are being made and broken among its ruins. It is war, and madness. And it is far from over.

The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud by Saïd K. Aburish

The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud

by Saïd K. Aburish
New York: St. Martin's, 1994. 328 pp. $24.95.
Aburish, a Palestinian journalist with books on such varied subjects as the bar at Beirut's St. George Hotel and his ancestral town of Bethany, writes about the Saudi dynasty with a rare hatred. His readiness to debunk Saudi pretensions is a welcome antidote to the endless drivel this subject usually inspires, but he ends up blinded by his hatred, to the point that the violence of his emotions undermines his own case. Contrary to Aburish's assertion, it is not a "simple, undeniable fact" that "behind Ibn Saud's rise to power was Britain's interest is finding someone to deputize for it"; to the contrary, this is nonsense. No less preposterous are his strained efforts to compare Ibn Saud with Hitler, his viewing immigrant labor as "officially sanctioned slavery," or his insistence that the House of Saud pumps "more oil than it needs."

The value of Aburish's well-written polemic lies less in its factual base or its considered judgments than in its being a passionate screed. However flawed its execution, the book constitutes a powerful attempt by an informed writer to make Westerners aware of the horrors lurking in this "Bedouin police state." He tells of massacres, of grotesque family corruption, and of sheer evil. Most significant of all for a foreign audience, he warns of the "coming fall" of the Saudi dynasty. To ward off this disaster, Aburish calls for a "total reversal of policy" in which the Western powers get the regime to bring its finances in order, establish a legislature, and decide on the current king's successor. Sounds like one Middle Easterner longs for the good old days of European colonialism, an eccentric opinion that these days seems to find increasing support.

Stephen Darori's Israel Book Review: Invisible Enemy Israel, Politics, Media, and Ameri...

Stephen Darori's Israel Book Review: Invisible Enemy Israel, Politics, Media, and Ameri...: For an example of the utter debasement of the anti-Israel argument in the United States, go no further than   Invisible Enemy , a quit...

The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud by Saïd K. Aburish

The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud
by Saïd K. Aburish
New York: St. Martin's, 1994. 328 pp. $24.95.

Aburish, a Palestinian journalist with books on such varied subjects as the bar at Beirut's St. George Hotel and his ancestral town of Bethany, writes about the Saudi dynasty with a rare hatred. His readiness to debunk Saudi pretensions is a welcome antidote to the endless drivel this subject usually inspires, but he ends up blinded by his hatred, to the point that the violence of his emotions undermines his own case. Contrary to Aburish's assertion, it is not a "simple, undeniable fact" that "behind Ibn Saud's rise to power was Britain's interest is finding someone to deputize for it"; to the contrary, this is nonsense. No less preposterous are his strained efforts to compare Ibn Saud with Hitler, his viewing immigrant labor as "officially sanctioned slavery," or his insistence that the House of Saud pumps "more oil than it needs."

The value of Aburish's well-written polemic lies less in its factual base or its considered judgments than in its being a passionate screed. However flawed its execution, the book constitutes a powerful attempt by an informed writer to make Westerners aware of the horrors lurking in this "Bedouin police state." He tells of massacres, of grotesque family corruption, and of sheer evil. Most significant of all for a foreign audience, he warns of the "coming fall" of the Saudi dynasty. To ward off this disaster, Aburish calls for a "total reversal of policy" in which the Western powers get the regime to bring its finances in order, establish a legislature, and decide on the current king's successor. Sounds like one Middle Easterner longs for the good old days of European colonialism, an eccentric opinion that these days seems to find increasing support.

A Survey of Dr Denise Meyerson's Books ( so far)

Bersin Deloitte Infographic “The Modern Learner”

The Future of Learning

A Survey of Dr Denise Meyerson's Books ( so far)   by Lisa Harvey

At the end of last century (a phrase that renders me ancient) I was studying at university as an external student. I didn’t attend lectures on-campus and I submitted all my work online and participated in online learning. Back then it was cutting edge. I loved it, but participation was difficult, not entirely intuitive, awkward for everyone, and a bit less than engaging.

Digital disruption happens over time, despite sounding like a leap of a cliff. A trend evolves as innovators stand on the shoulders of the early adopters who have paved the way with blood and mistakes. Soon anything less is inadequate.

Training has moved on from the clunky, difficult systems we used back then.

In an information workshop about the future of learning and development Dr Denise Meyerson told us all “you can’t undo the internet, so use it.”

Learning and training is a growing, billion dollar business. It’s no longer the domain of schools, universities and accredited institutions. Anyone with a smartphone and a YouTube account can be a trainer in anything from pivot tables to patchwork.

Learning and development professionals now have a much more complex task of strategy and design. They become content curators and training innovators, incorporating diverse delivery channels and providing a much deeper and more effective experience for the learner, and a more strategic result for their organisations.

Dr Meyerson outlined three trends that are disrupting the learning and development domain.

TREND 1 “The Modern Learner”

Corporate learning was once about the content and the classroom. Participants turned up and learned by listening and doing assignments alone.

It is now all about the learner: what content they engage with, what channels they access with, how they behave and respond, their preferences, and how they engage.

Modern learners are connected, geographically dispersed, overwhelmed, impatient, and distracted. They want training content on-demand, any time, and anywhere. And if they don’t get that from their employer they will get it from the Internet.

Bersin by Deloitte have done research, a snip from the infographic is above.

TREND 2 “The Learning Eco-system”

The digital environment has created many more delivery options for training.

A training Eco-system will include:

• Face to face.
• Online learning.
• Webinars, and webinar recordings.
• Virtual classrooms.
• Micro bites – small snippets of training.
• Ongoing reinforcement through apps, SMS, and other channels to embed knowledge.
• Collaboration.
• Social media.
• Podcasts.
• Interactive exercises such as quizzes, checklists, games.
• Gamification (see below).
• Performance measurement.

The job of the learning designer is to use of all of these options to meet the needs of the modern learner, and to curate training and development that delivers better outcomes..

TREND 3 Gamification

Engaging people using the aesthetics and mechanics of games can ramp up the engagement of any training.

Games, challenges, competition and rewards get people participating at a much higher rate. It is an easy way to get people familiar with digital platforms. Learners love leaderboards, progress ladders, levelling up and avatars. Well designed gamification can keep them engaged throughout the learning process.

It’s big and getting bigger. Learners will start to expect it.

About Denise Meyerson

Dr Denise Meyerson is an expert in learning and development strategies. She is CEO of  Management Consulting International which is a highly regarded learning and training company. I’ve done their courses and got to know them over many years. Denise is passionate about her field, and bases her work in science and she shares generously. Find her work here:

Home | Management Consultancy International
Management Consulting International is a Registered Training Organisation (RTO). MCI partners with your team to provide…www.mci.edu.au

Strategic Play: The Creative Facilitator's Guide
Amazon.com: Strategic Play: The Creative Facilitator's Guide (9781783240258): Jacqueline Lloyd Smith, Denise Meyerson…amzn.to

Better, Best, Brilliant: The Essential Guide For Trainers and Facilitators
Edit descriptionamzn.to

Lisa Harvey is  an entrepreneur, speaker, futurist and writer. She wrote wrote Technology for Writers 2016.